Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5 LGA 2011 EATX Motherboard Review

Gaming Tests

3DMark11 measures your PC’s gaming performance and makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders, and multi-threading.

3DMark Vantage

A reliable and popular benchmark, 3DMark Vantage can provide a good insight into the overall gaming performance of a system.

Dirt 3

Dirt 3 is a rallying video game and the third in the Dirt series of the Colin McRae Rally series, developed and published by Codemasters. The game was released in Europe and North America on May 24, 2011.

Crysis 2

Crysis 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Crytek and published by Electronic Arts in March 2011 for Microsoft Windows. The game is the second installment of the Crysis series and is the sequel to the 2007 video game Crysis and its expansion Crysis Warhead.

The X79-UD5 posted solid performance numbers in 3DMark11, but didn't flex its muscles much over the MSI X79A-GD65 (8D) in 3DMark Vantage, Dirt 3, and Crysis 2. Both of these boards seem to be evenly matched in our synthetic and real-world gaming benchmarks, but the X79-UD5 was a hair quicker than its competition in the same motherboard class.

I'm going crazy with this setup and hope somebody can help me. I7-3960X with 8 sticks of 8GB Crucial memory CT102464BA1339 stuffed into an X79-UD5 Everything is supposedly compatable, according to the HCL lists, and all the techs I've talked to from all three companies agree that it should work. Plenty of power, 1000W Cooler Master power supply, all the plugs ring out active with a volt meter. I've played with memory timings until I'm blue in the face. I'm on my third motherboard because GB thought there might be a problem with it, I'm on my second set of RAM, and on my second processor, still with the same results. Not matter what I do, if I populate more than DRAM-1 and DRAM-2 it goes into a rapid beep and won't even load the bios. Populating only 1 and 2 allows me to get into the bios and try to tweak the voltage and timing settings, but they always seem to cause an issue when it boots even if I'm adjusting the timings to a slower rate than what it was from stock. I've been building computers for 25 years now, and have never had this much trouble.

Ron, did you ever resolve this? I too have a maxed-out kit, but I've not even been able to get to the bios - as soon as the power is on, I'm just getting a string of beeps, which lasts about 20-30 seconds before ceasing. I've tried different RAM combos, and even thought it might be the graphics card, but have three to try with, yet no success. Driving me crazy.

I have a brand new Gigabyte X79 UD5 sitting in the box next to me. In front is an Intel 3930K and to my right are two 16GB quad kits from Corsair-2133 C9 1.5V. And on the box on the table behind me are two Evga 670 FTW's. I have a new Corsair 1200 W Pro Gold, an Asus Essence, an Areca Raid Card-1882 ix-12 4GB Memory. I have A Direct Connect via an 8088 SAS cable to a CineRaid 4Bay 6GB/sec self powered and cooled with a backplane to take the 8088 cable from the Areca. I have 3 SAS mini 8087 Breakout Sata 3 cable with each supplies four hard drives. I have 4 Seagate highend 300GB 15.7 K Cheetahs ready to be dropped into the CineRaid running 1.2TB in a Raid 0 thought a 6gb/sec raid card with an intel dual core processor and 4 gigs of memory and sitting in a X8 3.0 PCIe slot. The numbers coming out of that box will melt an SSD. I have 4 Vertex 4 128GB ready to be placed into a Raid 0 for the operating system. And to top it off I have 8 WD 1TB Blacks to fill out my Corsair 800D case. I am cooling the processor with a brand new and "rare" Coolitsystems Freezone Elite, and have 5 PWM fans to be integrated into the Bios cooling, with another 6 fans being run off of a Kaze Master Pro A. I am dropping in two Optical Drives- Plextor3d BluRay Burner, Plextor DVD Burner. I will install one USB 3.0 Pro37 U for high speed compact flash reading from a Nikon D800E.

My question is, should I be having second thoughts about the capability of the Gigabyte X79 UD5? I have come to the conclusion that there isn't an X79 board on the market yet that is a 5 star board hands down. I already know that Intel isn't showing the board makers their whole hand forcing the X79 folks to get creative with Bios Hacks, and Registry mods to give us 40 lanes. Nothing Native about any of these boards. I don't need a Rampage three with 30 PCIe X 16 3.0 slots and I run as fast as I can from all of these falsely advertised 16 lane bombs known as Z77's. The Asus Deluxe for $280 had a whopping 4 PCIE X1 slots- yes I have four sound cards!! and it provide 3 PCIe x16 3.0 slots but they never talked about these board's mamouth limitations in any of the reviews in that if you put a new 680 in the first slot you have X16, but drop anything into slot 2 and slot one is now back to a X8 which is nothing more than what we already had in the X16 2.0 boards! And if you make the mistake of dropping in anything into slot 3, you just toasted slot 2 and made it a X4 along with slot 3. WOW-- what a great motherboard you can have tri sli with a x8/x4/x4 with your new $1500 of 3.0 video cards.

So how long do I wait with all of these great build parts? Gigabyte says they have an amazing X79 refresh, will it be the improvement that is deserving of all these great components? I run from the Z77 as it is an EOL long before it was put on the market. No upgrades coming except a plug called Thunderbolt that has nothing that I own to plug into!

I had the same trouble. But I managed to get mine going after having discovered that this board does not like you using XMP at all. Had to turn down to 1333 mhz and have not touched my voltage settings. This is with all 8 channels full. Hope this helps.